Monday, August 22, 2016

Network Map of SF Writers That Philosophers Love

Andrew Higgins has created another of his fascinating network analysis maps -- this time of the science fiction / speculative fiction authors appearing on my updated Philosophical SF list, which consists of 10 SF recommendations each from 48 professional philosophers.

Higgins writes:

Each recommendation was treated as a connection (edge) between a scifi author and a philosopher who recommended that writer. These connections pull authors closer together insofar as they're recommended by the same people. One way to see this similarity is the physical locations of the authors relative to each other, but the color of the nodes is a more accurate indicator of similarity (based on modularity measure groupings, resolution = 1.7). The size of the circles reflects the number of recommendations for each author (weighted degree), and the size of the author's name was determined by network centrality (PageRank).

Or, in the common tongue, "Ooooh... pretty!"

[click on picture to enlarge]

Thanks, Andrew!

1 comment:

chinaphil said...

Ooh, pretty. It looks a little bit biased to me in favour of short story writers. I'm a bit disappointed to see Iain Banks didn't get more votes. He seems to have an awful lot of philosophical ideas, but perhaps they are too embedded in long books to be easily extracted and commented on, so don't appeal so much as philosophical ideas per se.